In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Law and Power in the Islamic World
  • Erin Stiles
Law and Power in the Islamic World. Sami Zubaida. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005 vii, 248 pp., $59.95 (cloth), $26.95 (paper)

In Law and Power in the Islamic World, Sami Zubaida offers a broad overview of the origins of Sharia, its institutions, and the changing and varied relationships among Sharia, political leadership, and state authority. Writing against essentialist conceptions in both Western and Islamic scholarly and political discourse that conceives of a unitary "Islamic Civilization" defined and determined by a religious core, Zubaida argues that the Sharia does not and never did comprise an immutable set of rules. Rather, it is "a product of articulations of legal discourses and institutions to various patterns of society and politics" (1). Zubaida's major focus in the book, though not addressed until the second half, is this articulation in states of the modern Middle East; he looks most closely at Turkey, Egypt, and Iran.

In the first half of the book, the author summarizes the origins of Sharia and proposes that what is known as Islamic law today is the result of the interpretive and exegetical work of scholars in the early centuries of Islam. He notes that even in this early period, scholars incorporated other legal traditions and local custom into interpretation; fiqh is therefore the "the historically developed shari'a" (16). Zubaida describes the various patterns of relationships between ulema and political authority in the medieval period. He pays particular attention to the function of qadis, who were subject to rulers, and the coexistence of Sharia with "extra-shari'a jurisdictions" (51). An example of the latter is the institution of mazalim, a ruler's tribunal that operated along-side Sharia courts and sometimes heard similar cases but did not normally judge according to fiqh or apply the Islamic rules of evidence. He argues that contrary to what has been proposed by other scholars, a general model based on features supposedly inherent in Muslim society from the earliest period cannot describe relationships of law and power. Rather, such relationships were characterized by both conflict and accommodation and were always subject to the changing social, economic, and political context.

Zubaida begins the second half of his book with a look at the nineteenth- and twentieth-century "etatization" of law under the Ottoman Empire and in the states that succeeded it. Etatization, as he describes it, was the move toward codification of law, constitutionalism, and the integration of legal authority into the body of the state. "Crucially," he writes, "codified law in its modern form is the law of the state, and the judge is a functionary of the state, who has to arrive at a judgment from the codes and procedures determined by it, rather than by autonomous judgement through reference to sacred sources and the principles derived from them by authoritative ancestors" (134). Reform came about in part through increasing European influence in the region, and Zubaida identifies three "conceptual shifts" that took place: the separation of government from the authority of the ulema, Sharia, and sultan; the separation of religious institutions from those of the state; and the idea of the equality of citizens. Zubaida takes a brief look at the "Saudi exception" to the general pattern of etatization: there was no codification of law, and application of the Sharia was left to the qadis.

Although distress about etatization and the decline of Muslim power fomented some popular and scholarly resistance to European models of modernization, Zubaida notes that throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, religious leaders and institutions mostly complied with reforms, and the process of secularization continued. However, by the late twentieth century debates over the "marginalization of shari'a" figured prominently in Islamic revivalist movements. Zubaida explores this in comparative case studies of Egypt and Iran. In their response to Egypt's twentieth-century secularization, he notes parallels between Egyptian modernists and Islamists in their mutual rejection of the historical traditions of fiqh in efforts to recapture the "essence" of the original divine law. Zubaida describes a surge of "moralistic Islam straddling government and opposition and speaking the...

pdf

Share